Generally speaking, linear searches are from start to end, not end to start - which makes sense from a human perspective. If you need to find strings in a string backwards, reverse your haystack and needle rather than manually chopping it up.

I think you shouldn't underestimate the length of $needle in the search of THE FIRST POSITION of it's last occurrence in the string. I improved the posted function, with added support for offset. I think this is an exact copy of the real function:

strripos() has very strange behaviour when you provide search position. For some reason it searches forward from the given position, instead of searching backward, that is more logical.

For example if you want to find instanse of $what, previous to the last, strripos($where, $what, $last_what_pos-1) will not wark as expected. It will return $last_what_pos again and again. And that has no sence at all.

To prevent this, I just used $prev_last_what_pos = strripos(substr($where,0,$last_what_pos), $what);